Fighting Wheat Disease with Farmers:

When people think about the challenges of growing wheat, they often imagine weather, weeds or perhaps even pests. However, for wheat growers in Pennsylvania, one of the most persistent and economically damaging threats is something far less visible at first glance: Fusarium Head Blight (FHB). This fungal disease can devastate yields and contaminate grain with toxic substances.

Fusarium Head Blight, sometimes known as “scab,” is more than just a plant disease. It is a food safety issue, an economic burden and a management challenge, especially for farmers already navigating tight margins. My research as a FFAR Fellow at Penn State University aims to address this problem not in a lab, but on farms, in partnership with the people most affected by it.

FHB is caused by species of the Fusarium fungus, with Fusarium graminearum being the most common in North America. It infects wheat heads during flowering, producing shriveled, discolored kernels that are often contaminated with deoxynivalenol (DON), a mycotoxin harmful to both humans and animals.

The FDA limits DON in wheat products to 1 part per million (ppm). Contaminated grain may be docked in price or rejected altogether, causing real financial loss. In Pennsylvania, FHB led to an estimated $20 million in losses between 2018 and 2024. For a disease that strikes over just a few weeks, the economic ripple is significant.

Recently, Fusarium graminearum even featured in a U.S. Department of Justice case, highlighting its broader importance beyond agriculture. While rare, such attention reminds us why research on this pathogen and effective, farmer-informed strategies to manage it is critical.

While researchers have developed many tools and recommendations to manage FHB, including planting resistant varieties, rotating crops and applying fungicides at the right time, adoption remains inconsistent. One reason? Most trials happen at research stations, under uniform conditions that don’t reflect the variability of real farms.

That is where my research comes in. My work focuses on conducting participatory, on-farm trials of fungicide efficacy across 11 different farmers’ fields in Pennsylvania. The idea is simple yet powerful: instead of asking farmers to fit their operations into research protocols, why not build the trials into their real-world practices?

In these trials, farmers planted their usual wheat varieties and followed their typical management practices. At flowering, the stage when wheat heads are most susceptible to infection, they apply fungicides to side-by-side strips in their fields, leaving other strips untreated as controls. The farmers themselves selected the fungicides used, and all applications were done with equipment already in use on the farm.

This approach enabled us to capture a realistic picture of how fungicides perform under variable conditions, including different soil types, weather patterns and wheat varieties. More importantly, it gave farmers ownership of the research process and a direct view of the results in their fields.

After the fungicide applications, we returned to the fields at the soft-dough growth stage to assess disease levels. Using standardized quadrat sampling (think of it as tossing a square frame on the ground at random locations), we collected data on the severity of Fusarium Head Blight and foliar diseases that affect the leaves and can also contribute to yield loss. At harvest, we also collected grain samples for postharvest. These samples were tested for DON levels, kernel quality and final grain yield.

Across the farms, fungicide treatments reduced FHB severity by 4–19%, depending on the year and location. Foliar disease severity was also reduced by 2–34%. Mycotoxin concentrations dropped dramatically in treated plots by 63 to 94% bringing most samples below the FDA threshold. We also observed consistent improvements in grain quality, with a decrease in the number of Fusarium-damaged kernels. And yield? That also increased by 4 to 23%, depending on the farm.

Of course, not every farm saw the same results. One of the key lessons from this work is that disease pressure and, consequently, fungicide benefits can vary significantly from year to year and from place to place. That’s part of why involving farmers in research is so critical: they bring local knowledge, practical experience and real-time decision-making into the equation.

Fungicide treatment helps, but it’s no silver bullet. Managing FHB long-term will require integrated strategies, including resistant varieties, better decision tools and more outreach to ensure growers are informed and supported.

I hope this kind of participatory research can serve as a model for other pathosystems and production systems. When science and farming work hand in hand, everyone benefits.

I am grateful to the Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research and my industry sponsor (Bayer Cropscience) for supporting my work and participation as a FFAR Fellow. Their investment in student-led, stakeholder-engaged professional development has enabled me to ask meaningful questions and generate results that matter both in theory and in practice.